Television.

Tv Industry Is Leaping On Rock Drama Bandwagon

PASADENA, Calif. — The Who almost got it right more than a quarter-century ago when they sang that rock was dead. It turns out it's rock video that's flat-lined.

But the rock drama on TV -- that's different. The live-fast-die young-leave-a-good looking-corpse mentality of the 1960s and '70s laid the foundation for numerous movie projects, not to mention 14,867 installments of "VH1: Behind the Music."

The rock movie has been around in theaters since the 1950s; today, television has been tapping that vein (so to speak), most notably in the VH1 documentary series. But the network and others have branched out into excavating the drama of rock, both in biopics and a couple of new fictional series coming this fall.

MTV, which used to play rock videos, has branched out in many different directions (likewise, country cousin TNN is also moving away from videos). One will be a new series "Live Through This," in which a fictional seminal group from the '70s, the Jackson Decker Band, reunite to go on tour with their various children, ages 12 to 24. Hey, isn't that the MTV demographic?

Meanwhile, VH1 will continue what it started last season by rolling out more rock 'n' roll flicks. The slate includes: a biopic on Meat Loaf subtitled "To Hell and Back"; the comedy "Out of Sync," in which a gorgeous but off-key singer has her vocals dubbed by the ugly duckling with the gorgeous voice (only in television would Gail O'Grady, late of "NYPD Blue," qualify as ugly); and "At Any Cost," the typical story in which rock 'n' roll kills and soars.

"I have this fear that one of these years, I'm going to stand up here and have nothing to say except, `We've run out of rock history to strip-mine,"' VH1 executive vice president Jeff Gaspin recently told reporters at the Television Critics Association Press Tour.

Even Showtime is getting involved: In "The Chris Isaak Show," the rocker and his band play themselves in a mockumentary akin to the late, great "Larry Sanders Show." Isaak, who conducted one of the funniest news conferences in recent memory at the press tour, said the stories will be fiction based on his experiences.

"We wanted to have people that we can kill off every week," he said. Don't put it past him.

But there's a fly in the programming ointment: Most of the rock-as-drama fare we've seen on television the past few years has been weak.

"That's why I didn't do one," said rock legend David Crosby, who was promoting "Stand and Be Counted," a documentary mini-series on the history of music as agent for social change (it debuts next month on The Learning Channel).

While Crosby's life, and much of what we see on "Behind the Music," is perfect dramatic fare, he wants no part of it.

"Most of them have been so trashy and so shallow that they're really not worth watching," he said. "I cite the Beach Boys one (ABC's `An American Family') as an example. I've been asked to do one for my autobiography (`Long Time Gone') over and over again, but I'm not willing to have my life memorialized in a six-week movie for TV. They don't do it well enough."